1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to on-line services, particularly to services for the World Wide Web.
2. State of the Art
The Internet, and in particular the content-rich World Wide Web ("the Web"), have experienced and continue to experience explosive growth. The Web is an Internet service that organizes information using hypermedia. Each document can contain embedded reference to images, audio, or other documents. A user browses for information by following references. Web documents are specified in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), a computer language used to specify the contents and format of a hypermedia document (e.g., a homepage). HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol used to access a Web document
Part of the beauty of the Web is that it allows for the definition of device-, system-, and application-independent electronic content. The details of how to display or play back that content on a particular machine within a particular software environment are left to individual web browsers. The content itself, however, need only be specified once. In some sense, then, the Web offers the ultimate in cross-platform capability.
Pre-existing collections of information, however, such as databases of various kinds, can rarely be placed directly on the Web. Rather, gateway programs are used to provide access to a wide variety of information and services that would otherwise be inaccessible to Web clients and servers. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) specification has emerged as a standard way to extend the services and capabilities of a Web server having a defined core functionality. CGI "scripts" are used for this purpose. CGI provides an Application Program Interface, supported by CGI-capable Web servers, to which programmers can write to extend the functionality of the server. CGI scripts in large part produce from non-HTTP objects HTTP objects that a Web client can render, and also produce from HTTP objects non-HTTP input to be passed on to another program or a separate server, e.g., a conventional database server. More information concerning the CGI specification may be accessed using the following Universal Resource Locator (URL): http://hoohoo.ncsaiuiuc.edu/cgi/interfac.html
With the explosive growth of the Web, fueled in part by the extensibility provided by CGI scripts, the need for "finding aids" for the Web, i.e., tools to allow one to find information concerning a topic of interest, has grown acute. Many hard-copy volumes are presently available that are represented to be "White Pages" or "Yellow Pages" for the Web. Of course, hard copy information becomes rapidly out of date, and in the case of the Web, is out of date before it is even printed (let alone distributed), in the sense of failing to list many interesting resources newly made available on the Web.
The only effective solution is to have such finding aids be on-line, available on the Web itself. One such finding aid is a class of software tools called search engines. Search engines rely on automated Web-traversing programs called robots or spiders that follow link after link around the Web, cataloging documents and storing the information for transmission to a parent database, where the information is sifted, categorized, and stored. When a search engine is run, the database compiled through the efforts of the robots and spiders is searched using a database management system. Using keywords or search terms provided by the user, the database locates matches and possibly near-matches as well.
An example of one such search engine is known as Yahoo, offered by Yahoo! Corporation of Mountain View, Calif., and may be accessed at the URL http://www.yahoo.com. Persons having pages on the Web, rather than simply waiting to have their Web page be found by a robot or spider, can also have their Web page listed in the Yahoo database by providing information concerning the resource they wish to list and paying a fee. The result is an on-line-searchable directory of Web resources that is regularly updated.
While such services are indeed extremely useful, nevertheless, from the standpoint of a person wishing to publicize their Web site, they are typically attended by a number of drawbacks. In particular, the person wishing to publicize their Web site typically has very limited control of the content of the resulting listing. Submissions, including textual description and suggested categories, are often subjected to editorial control that may range from strict to arbitrary. As a result, a listing may be placed under an entirely different category from the category intended by the person making the submission. Furthermore, the textual description may be heavily edited (in some instances almost beyond recognition)--or even deleted--depending on the exaction of the editor. Because of this editorial process, posting of the listing is not immediate. Furthermore, once the listing has been posted to the database, if the person making the listing later wishes to change the listing in some respect, the change must again pass through the same laborious channel. Hence, the process of adding and updating listings is inconvenient and unsatisfactory.
Moreover, the nature of the listing is rather prosaic. The listing is in title/brief-description format and does not include graphical elements or otherwise appeal to the artistic sensibilities of the viewer. In this sense, the listing is comparable to the standard telephone book listing, which appears in plain text, nothing added, as compared, say, to a quarter-page advertisement with custom artwork and the like.
To use the foregoing service, one is required have a Web homepage. If a user has no Web presence but wishes to establish one, the foregoing service is entirely unavailable. The typical user must first establish a Web presence by paying a Web consultant to produce a homepage and then paying an Internet Service Provider to house that homepage on the Web. This undertaking can prove to be quite costly for an individual or a small business.
What is needed, then, is an information service that overcomes the foregoing disadvantages.